


Knights of the Unknown

by MazeltovCocktail



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 12:37:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18094448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MazeltovCocktail/pseuds/MazeltovCocktail
Summary: The Sith Empire, reborn in blood on Malachor some thirty years past, stands at a restless, hungry ceasefire with the fragmented Republic. Brushfire wars, insurgencies, and skirmishes ebb and flow across the Outer Rim as brazen fleet exercises and weapons tests court disaster on both sides of the galactic border. The Sith empress herself, once a wandering exile, now the most powerful woman in the galaxy, has had a vision of a nameless terror stirring in the dark beyond the edges of known space. She has summoned her allies and the lords of her empire to Malachor, bidding them to bring their fleets and legions, to prepare for a great undertaking such as has never been seen. Into the Unknown, beneath the bloody banner of the Sith, the empress has called a crusade.





	1. Darth Mercuria

A fleet has assembled over broken Malachor, hanging in the void above its shattered plains and knife-edged cliffs. Or perhaps it is better to say that many fleets have gathered there, for alliances do not come easily to those who call themselves the Dark Lords of the Sith.

If not for the empress’s vision, would they have abandoned their feuds and schemes, their trysts and ancient texts and cruel experiments? She was their sovereign, once an exile cast adrift beyond the edges of known space, now the suzerain of half the Outer Rim and great swathes of the Core. It was she who raised the Sith up out of shadow, who rebuilt the academies on Korriban and Malachor, who shaped like clay the first generation of the reborn cult. It is she who rules from the dark heart of her teacher’s tomb on the ruined world below.

And so now they answer her call, albeit warily. Darth Nimphas from her seat on fair Naboo, Darth Gargant from his frozen homeworld, Toola, Darth Malady from Byss and Darth Paratus from the temples of the B’omarr on Tatooine. One by one they join her, stripped by masked assassins at the door of her atrium of their retinues and weapons, filing in silence into the long, dark room with its bare table and its narrow windows looking out over a crazed landscape of belching vents and broken peaks kissed by green scrawls of lightning.

Still silent they take their seats at the pale table, carved from the bones of some terrible beast that had lived and died on Malachor before any of their species rose up from the mud. Lady Nimphas in her flowing robes of pink and peach, sleeves hanging to the floor, the delicate green oval of her face shaded by a wide headpiece hung with a veil of strung seed pearls. Malady in her black ventilator mask, solemn and expressionless. The Whiphid Gargant in his coarse white robe, bound at the waist with a heavy sash from which stone weights hung by thick lengths of twine, his slitted black eyes watchful beneath the broad, pitched brim of his woven hat.

Fastidious Darth Paratus, once the Empress’s chamberlain, takes his seat with care, a slender hand raised to still the tattooed lekku wound scarflike about his narrow throat. Of all those assembled, Paratus has the smallest fleet, the fewest troops, but weakness is a kind of strength at the negotiating table. They will see him as a pawn to bolster one faction against the other. He can use that. Next prideful Corax, Sathari plumage vibrant blue, talons clicking loud against the tiles.

They watch each other. They watch the empty throne, high-backed and narrow, at the table’s head. The air fumes with the dark churn of their emotions, heating to a white-hot glow where the stormfronts of their minds squeal one against another, metal fatigue screaming in the Force. Others begin to arrive. Nightsisters from Dathomir, robed in red, faces painted white and black with river clay. A Hutt crime lord from the Radhmurti kajidic, long and sleek and muscular, moving under her own power. Another from the rival Bochima clan, older and more corpulent, pupils dilated with the chemical frisson of some spice-derived compound.

And last, the Mandalorians. Clan Kando, clan Hakken, clan Voss. A dozen lesser raider bands, dregs of old wars swept up and given purpose again by the new empire and its conquests. The Mandalore himself came after them in his scarred gunmetal carapace, ventilators hissing. The Sith lords have their armies, their acolytes, their fleets and secrets, but the Mandalore and his legions are the empress’s mailed fist, a force against which no system can stand alone. He and Gargant nod to one another.

Acid rain drums sharp against the windows. Lightning flickers, throwing shadows long over the floor and table and the faces of the waiting potentates. If a missile struck this room, the empire’s heart would stop. Chaos would reign for decades.

The empress makes them wait.

Seconds stretched, grew thin, and sagged under their own weight. Minutes fall like drops of water wearing away stone. An hour. The masters of the empire grow restless. They eye one another, nursing suspicions of treachery, dwelling on old grudges. They fidget like children. The Mandalorians reach for the security of absent weapons. Only the Hutts are patient. Their lives stretch on for slow, cold, calculating millenia. They are used to waiting.

And then, all at once, she is near. Not here yet, no, but _close._ She wants them to feel this. She wants to savor their apprehension. She wants to bathe in their blank horror. She knows that to sense her presence is to stick a finger into an infected wound, to tongue an empty, swollen socket and taste pus, to feel insects hatch and feed and fuck and die beneath one’s skin, chewing mazes out of fat and muscle.  

The gathered mighty look at one another in sudden commiseration, fighting against panic, against adoration, against hate and love and fear and stark revulsion. A hole in the Force is coming. A gash. A suppurating injury. How strong she is, what she can do at the outermost limits of her might, they cannot sense, but the wrongness of her runs down the walls like blood. Among all of them, only she can truly _feed_ as Nihilus fed. They fear her teeth. They are in awe of her.

The pressure door at the room’s northern end, a great bronzium disc, hisses as it cycles open. A male Miraluka, young and slim, stalks into the room. His veil and half-cape are both crimson, his segmented armor the color of dried gore. Against the bottomless roar of his mistress, the fissile heat of him is slight, but those who touch it feel the sting of his cold hate, his bottled rage. Darth Agravaine, the empress’s apprentice. He takes up his position at the throne’s left hand.

The room stands, chairs scraping, sweat beading on furrowed brows. She is close, coming, the sound of swarming insects clawing at eadrums, almost-

She is here.

Meetra Surik. The Sith Empress. The Butcher of Malachor. Time has touched her only with the utmost reverence in the thirty years since her master's plunge into the planet’s dying heart. Gray at her temples, faint lines at the corners of her eyes. No jewelry. No ornament of rank. Her mouth is wide, her nose long and sharp, her slender frame a little thickened by her pregnancies and the slow march of years. She wears her hair long in a heavy blond braid and her blue eyes bite like winter on Hoth, crushing the silence of the room into something even lesser, smaller, more unworthy. She looks at each of them.

Their empress crosses the room in silence, save for the clink of her lightsabers one against the other at her waist. Her robe is black as night, the hood thrown back, and beneath it she wears a monk’s simple black tunic, belted with a broad black cloth, and hose. Her slippered feet are dainty, like a child’s. Darth Agravaine takes her hand and guides her to her seat.

The assembled sink to their knees, salute fist to breast, lower their eyes. The Hutts genuflect after the fashion of their people. For all that hunger, deep and dark, impossible to sate, throbs in the air about her, they are in her thrall. They love her. They would die for her. Tall, thin Paratus bows from the waist as the empress settles on her throne.

“Welcome, Darth Mercuria.”


	2. The Unknown

Even through the veil of concealment Fi had wrapped about herself, Silna could feel her twin’s boredom. They had been crouched together for three long, cramped, musty-smelling hours in the hidden arcade overlooking the east atrium, watching through pinholes as their mother made the empire’s highest sweat. It excited Sil to see what one could do with power, to sit in watchful silence while their mother wielded love and fear like a surgeon with a scalpel. Fi was different, more like their older sister Kreia, mother’s master’s namesake. She liked to work with her hands.

Fila’s boredom was a nagging discomfort at the back of her mind, a thought trying to escape its slick cocoon and become action. It had always been this way, ever since they’d come into the world fifteen years ago and woken in their cradle to the sight of one another. One twin’s anger, her hurt, her foul mood, was the other’s. Even worlds away they felt each other’s faintest whim.

 _The Force is strong with you,_ their mother’s consort, pretty Visas with her rosebud lips and polished marble skin, had told them once. _You share more than just a face._

Even at court there weren’t many who could tell them apart. Mother. Visas. Atton. Hanharr had been able to, when they were little, but now he was little Asi and Tion’s bodyguard and seldom saw the twins or their older siblings. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, Sil smelled for a moment the spicy musk of the Wookiee’s pelt and felt the lean, corded strength of his arms holding her close. He had hated them, she knew, but he had loved them too, as he hated and loved their mother, serving her like a vrelt crawling on its belly in his helpless, mad devotion.

 _Mother gave us Hanharr to teach us love and hatred are the same,_ Fi thought at her. _He was just a tool. A lesson._

 _Mother doesn’t use people like tools,_ Sil answered. _She loves them. That way, when they die or fail or turn on her, the grief and hatred makes her stronger._

Fi rolled her eyes, pale green like Sil’s, and slumped against the inner wall beside the peephole, all interest in the waiting game below evaporating. “I’m going to the sparring yard,” she whispered. “Are you coming?”

 _No,_ thought Sil. _I’ll stay. I think mother wants us to watch._

Fi shrugged. She squeezed Sil’s hand and then turned and crawled away into the gloom of the arcade until the shadows swallowed her slim frame and restless presence. Sil renewed her focus, drawing on the spark of her irritation with her twin to thicken the obscuring veils she’d drawn around herself within the Force. Observation, Atton had taught her, was most useful when undetected. Any of the Sith in the atrium below might have smelled Sil out anywhere else, but here they were distracted by each other, and by thoughts of the empress. A perfect chance to practice.

 _I am a hole in the world,_ Sil thought, pressing her eye to the peephole. She could feel her mother coming now, a bruising wave of power sweeping through the halls of the Trayus Academy. _No light escapes me. No sound passes my lips._

The tangle of emotion below surged and sparked as the empress drew closer. Darth Agravaine, Visas’s son, came through the door and a shiver ran through the room. Sil bit her lip and let her thoughts of his strong body, his lean arms and full, soft mouth flow into her connection to the Force. She could almost hear Fi laughing at her.

Paratus, who had been Imperial Chamberlain when they were little, rose to greet the empress. The others followed and whatever words Sil’s mother traded with the Twi’Lek were lost in the din of chair legs scraping over stone and armored knees striking the tiles. Sil could _feel_ Paratus, though, whose emotions had always eluded her before. Or perhaps she only felt what he wanted her to feel. Masks behind masks.

From her mother, as always, she felt only the familiar emptiness and a great, inexorable sense of tension, as though her umbilical cord had never been cut and now was slowly drawing taut, pulling her back to the long, dark dream of her first sleep. That was what had bent the galaxy to her mother’s will, more than any lightsaber or army. No one, not Mandalore, not Hanharr, not slippery Atton or iron-willed Brianna, could resist her.

_Love is fire. It can burn._

The empress, seated, crossed her legs and crooked a finger at Agravaine, who bent down to let her whisper in his ear. He nodded before straightening. The atrium waited on their mistress, whose scarred fingers tapped against the bone arms of her chair. Her braid lay draped over one shoulder like a sleeping python.

She spoke, a needle shattering a sheet of glass.

“Some of you have already felt it.”

A ripple ran through the assembled powers. Murmurs swept over the room. The powerful young Hutt near the table’s foot paled by several shades of green as the Sith hurried to proclaim agreement or maintain their various flavors of mysterious silence. No matter the playacting, though, the empress was telling the truth. She wasn’t the only one the ripples from the Unknown had disturbed.

“Something is stirring beyond the Outer Rim, a threat such as the galaxy has never seen. I have dreamed of Malachor bombarded to black glass, of Coruscant’s great towers plunging into fire and ruin, of my children marching among endless throngs of shackled slaves-”

Silna’s heart skipped a beat. For a moment she could see it too, a broken slope of shale leading up and up and up to an ash-choked sky, could taste sulfurous air, feel metal chafing at the raw skin of her ankles. And then it was gone. She gasped,  Agravaine was looking at her. Not with his eyes—he had none—but with his sight, his world of blood and molten gold. He smiled at her, those perfect lips curving with mischievous humor.

 _You beast,_ thought Fi. _He’s practically our brother._

Sil scrambled back from the peephole, flushed and dripping with sweat. When had it gotten so hot? _You’re just jealous,_ she shot back, suddenly furious. Their mother was still talking, but she couldn’t hear the words. She spat to clear her mouth of the spoiled-egg taste of sulfur.  

 _Sweet baby,_ said Fi, and Sil could feel her twin’s apology, her tender touch against her cheek. Softer than soft. Closer than close. _It was only a vision._

_Leave it to the seers._

 

* * *

 

 

Admiral Canderous Surik of the Imperial First Fleet stood at the end of the captain’s walk on the bridge of the _centurion-_ class battlecruiser _Immortal,_ sweating like a Kitonak in a steam bath. Malachor’s exosphere was already a powderkeg, Sith warships with nothing connecting them but allegiance to the empress staring one another down while Mandalorian cutters prowled like Colo claw fish between the larger ships and Hutt carracks and galleons made a show of lowering their shields and opening their observation decks for their ill-trained crews to moon the imperial air patrols. And the worst of it hadn’t even started yet.

 _Half the empire balanced on a pinhead because my mother had a vision._ He swallowed past the lump in his throat. He lacked his sisters’ and younger brother’s connection to the Force, but he’d had no shortage of proof of its terrible power in his thirty-one years as the empress’s eldest. _What did she see? What’s so hell-fired important that we’re leaving the border wide open from here to Ord Mantell?_

“Incoming, sir,” said the signalman, a dour Gossam.

“You’ll all been briefed,” growled Canderous across the fleet-wide comm channel. “Weapons cold, comms quiet. Any of you vrelts so much as bares a tooth and I’ll be on a shuttle over there to rip it out myself inside the hour.”

He killed the comm and fished a kerchief from his uniform jacket, mopping at his brow. The first Republic ship blinked out of hyperspace a few thousand astral leagues outside of orbit— its sleek length silent and bristling with turbolaser batteries. A corvette. _Hammerhead_ -class. Canderous could practically feel the fleet’s collective asshole clench.

“She’s hailing us, sir,” said his comms officer.

Canderous nodded. He gripped the walk’s slender rail and leaned his weight against it. “Open a channel.”

The holoprojector at the foot of the walk came to life with a crackling hiss, its lenses cycling as an image of a squat, stern-looking Zabrak woman in naval dress materialized above it and came into focus. She wore her hair in a high, tight bun. Her voice buzzed through the bridge’s address system.

“Rear admiral Layru Drote, RNS _Halberd._ Is this Surik?”

“In the flesh,” said Canderous, ignoring the stout Zabrak’s rudeness. Years of constant brinksmanship and skirmishing had left nerves frayed in both the empire’s navy and the enemy’s. “Where are the rest of your birds, admiral?”

Drote looked him up and down. She seemed unimpressed. “Waiting for the all-clear. Captain to captain, I’ve your word we’re clear to dispatch shuttles planetside?”

“You have my word,” he said.

Drote killed the connection, her image fizzing out into a haze of light and static. The Gossam, lieutenant Elik, turned from her station. “Her deep-space comm is hot, sir. She’s signaling.”

Two _harvester-_ class battlecruisers flashed out of hyperspace to either side of Drote’s corvette, their great prows like legionary shields. Three more corvettes followed, bulky, brutal-looking _dauntless_ -class gunships, and a great sickle-pattern carrier that must have been two kilometers and change along her keel alone. 

Canderous mopped again at his neck and forehead. _Just keep it together,_ he told himself, knowing as he did that half his crew thought he only gave orders because of the womb he’d grown in. More, probably, after they saw the puddle he was going to leave at the end of the captain’s walk once this day was over. He wasn’t sure he’d even disagree with them.

 _It should be Inisa here, and me with the boys._ He thought of his wife, of her impassive face and cool, measured stare. She would have stared Drote down, brought the whole thing to the wire, and then pulled it off like nothing. No loss of face, no bitten nails. _She would have held their faces to the fire._

The nearer battlecruiser launched two wedge-hulled shuttles. They hung a moment silhouetted against the green-white arc of the gas giant at the system’s heart as they headed for the atmosphere. The admiral stowed his kerchief and breathed a long, weary sigh of relief.

The Jedi were coming to Malachor.


End file.
